


The Thing That Shall Not Die

by CaraLee



Series: Voltron Bingo [2]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: (I have no endgame ships), (It's all gen), Adam is Mentioned but does not appear, Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, Both of those are already tags, But he's still here, Except it isn't temporary?, Gen, Ghost Shiro (Voltron), Homeless Keith (Voltron), I wish I was surprised, Past Adashi Mentioned, Temporary Character Death, yet - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-18
Updated: 2018-09-18
Packaged: 2019-07-13 21:29:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16026329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CaraLee/pseuds/CaraLee
Summary: A strange tugging rips through him, worsening the horrifying sensation still creeping under his…skin, and suddenly, instead of being huddled on the floor of his-not-his room, Shiro is back in the alley where he woke up.What. The. Hell!He needs to find out what happened. He needs to find Keith.





	The Thing That Shall Not Die

**Author's Note:**

> Another Voltron Bingo Fill! This time for "Ghost AU"

Things are blurry at the end. Unfocused, almost like he is dreaming.

 The pounding in his head and the phantom lightning-pain where his right arm should be fade away, along with the other, unnoticeable in comparison, aches and pains and the burn of infection. The small part of his mind still capable of rational thought notes the encroaching cold with a detached interest.

 _I’m going into shock._ He thinks. Then, _I’m dying_.

_Keith is going to get into so much trouble without me there._

 

* * *

 

Shiro wakes up feeling confused. He has no memory of how he got to where he is (a rather dirty alleyway, complete with a puddle he is lying in) or where he had been before that. His head feels foggy, like after he has a really bad attack.

Well, wherever he is, and however he got here, he should probably get home. Keith will be out of his mind with worry by now. A quick check of his pockets reveals no phone, so instead he steps out of the alleyway to take a look around and try and figure out where he is. As late at night as it is, the streets are nearly empty, only a few scattered figures hurrying along with their heads down.

He is relieved to find that he recognizes his surroundings: Market Street, one of his and Keith’s favorite destinations for nights when they decide to go out to eat, packed on both sides with small, family-owned restaurants of every flavor imaginable. (Pun fully intended.) For a moment, Shiro debates stopping by the Garretts’ to see if he can use their phone. They are always in late, even after they close since both Devisha and Filo are very particular about the state they leave their kitchen in. They also have a tendency to hand out leftovers to hungry young men, exclaiming about how Shiro and Keith (mostly Keith) need more meat on their bones.

In the end, he just sticks his hands in his pockets and hurries by the darkened windows of the tiny eatery, smiling at the faint glimmer of light he can make out through the door leading to the kitchen. Maybe he and Keith should come by sometime soon. It’s been awhile and Keith always gets hilariously embarrassed at being fussed over, Shiro takes a gleeful delight in watching his ears turn red as he tries to disappear under the table.

It isn’t a long walk from Market to the small apartment he and Keith share and he sneaks cautiously up the broken fire escape to the third floor window that opens into his bedroom. Maybe, if he is really quiet, he’ll be able to sneak back in and Keith will never know he had been gone.

(Who’s he kidding? Even at whatever ungodly hour this is, Keith is probably either sitting on Shiro’s bed with his arms crossed and his grumpy “I’m the younger brother, _I’m_ supposed to be the irresponsible one” face on, or slumped over asleep on Shiro’s bed after waiting there with his arms crossed and grumpy face on.)

In Shiro’s defense, he’s not _actually_ any less responsible than Keith. It’s just that Keith’s idea of A Good Time involves a lot fewer clubs and a lot more snuggling in a blanket fort in front of the TV. He’s more the “good night in” kind of person and anytime Shiro forces him to come along he ends up sulking in the corner with his under-eighteen wrist band and hiding from the drag queens who think he’s adorable and are always a lot happier to see him than he is to see them.

When he arrives on their floor, Shiro reaches out to open the window (which is definitely closed, he can see the reflection of the opposite building in the glass).

And falls right through it.

That isn’t normal.

Like, at all.

Even for them.

It’s not his bedroom either, he notices after a moment of startled confusion.  It’s his room, but it isn’t _his._ His posters are gone, his bookshelf is missing, and that is not his bed.

And whoever is asleep in it is very tall, very blond, and definitely _not_ Keith.

_What the hell is going on?_

_I fell through a window!_

Shiro looks down and only now realizes that he can see through himself.

His immediate reaction is to notice that whoever is living in his home now, they obviously never vacuum. ( _Why is someone in his home?!?!)_

He follows that up by panicking.

He crouches on the floor, breathing fast, but also…not breathing? He is going through the motions of breathing but something feels off. Like the fact that he is definitely not taking in enough oxygen is not actually affecting him. He’s transparent and possibly incorporeal and someone else is living in his apartment and all of this is coming together to form a picture he really doesn’t like the look of.

 _I’m dead_ . He admits to himself, somewhat hysterically. _I’m pretty sure I’m dead. And a ghost._

Blond-Not-Him stirs and rolls over, blinking out at the room for a moment, his sleep-clouded eyes passing right over Shiro without so much as the briefest hesitation as he pulls himself out of bed and, before Shiro can move out of the way, stumbles _through_ him.

Shiro barely notices the bathroom door opening, he’s too busy fighting the strange, chilly combination of nausea and breathlessness that hit him when the stranger passed through him. Like an icy hand had gripped hold of his core and squeezed.

_What is going on! What happened? Where is Keith?_

A strange tugging rips through him, worsening the horrifying sensation still creeping under his…skin, and suddenly, instead of being huddled on the floor of his-not-his room, Shiro is back in the alley where he woke up.

_What. The. Hell!_

Shiro staggers to his feet, leaning against the rough brick wall and clinging to the rusted fire escape, pathetically glad that whatever it was that made him fall through the window a moment ago doesn’t seem to be happening again right now. Nothing feels _solid_ exactly, but it had been like the window wasn’t even _there_ and Shiro is trying very hard _not_ to think about falling all the way through to the Earth’s core right now.

He needs to find out what happened. He needs to find _Keith_.

A sudden rattle above his head startles him and he jumps out towards the middle of the alley (which isn’t far, two people couldn’t walk shoulder to shoulder down this alley, at least not if one of them is Shiro) and whirls around to face whatever new weirdness is about to descend because honestly, nothing would surprise him right now.

And he is met by a bleary, familiar pair of purple-grey eyes.

_“Keith?”_

Keith stares back, face bruised and dirty, hair even more bedraggled than usual, an indescribable look on his face.

“ _Shiro?_ ”

Overcome by the events of the night, Shiro nods, unable to speak.

Keith _launches_ himself from the fire escape, and Shiro barely has a moment to panic before he is hit by all too-few pounds of little brother, warm, and solid, and _not falling through him to land face first on the street thank god!_

He wraps his arms around Keith, hugging him tight, distantly noting that he is wearing too many layers but Shiro can still feel his ribs. He hasn’t been eating right. And…something else feels off? Shiro can’t figure out what it is, but Keith does.

“Shiro!” he pulls back and looks down. Keith blinks up at him, frowning. “What happened to your arm?”

Shiro looks down at his right arm. Or rather, where it should be.

_Oh._

There’s nothing there. It’s as if his arm was cut off halfway above the elbow, a scar-covered stump the only thing left.

Shiro still can’t remember what happened to him but he’s getting the impression that it wasn’t very nice.

“You lost your arm?” Keith says, sounding bewildered, still clinging to Shiro’s shirt-front the way he does after a Bad Night.

“I don’t think that’s all I lost.” Shiro admits, not really sure how to go about broaching the subject and eventually settling on the direct approach. “I think I’m dead.”

Keith never really has much color in his face to begin with, even on a good day, and he goes so pale that Shiro is worried for a moment that he might actually pass out or throw up. Huh. Would vomit go through Shiro like the dude in his room did? Or would it hit him like Keith?

The fingers in his shirt tighten so much that Shiro wonders if his…ghost clothes? Will be able to rip. “No.” Keith says, raw and desperate, his voice rough in the way it always is after he’s gone a long time without talking. “You’re here.” But there is a dawning horror in his eyes as he begins to notice the things Shiro already has.

“I think I’m a ghost.” Shiro says softly, gripping Keith’s elbow in his one hand, wishing desperately he had the other so he could properly hold him. Keith usually does best when grounded by touch. “I woke up here and I don’t remember how I got here and I went to the apartment and fell through the window.” He should probably have needed to pause to breathe by now, but he hasn’t. “Keith, how long has it been? Someone else was in my room and they _walked right through me._ They never even _saw_ me.”

Keith is still shaking his head, denial stubborn in the face of Shiro’s words. “It’s- You’ve been gone a _year,_ Shiro. They were going to put me back in the system.” He buries his face back in Shiro’s chest and Shiro can feel him shaking. “Everyone said you were probably dead and they were going to put me back in a group home until I aged out and…No one believed me when I said you’d come back. No one believed me.”

“Keith,” Shiro has a suspicion of where this is heading. “Are you homeless?”

Keith shrugged, the motion invisible but easily felt. “Technically?”

Shiro sighs, wishing he was more surprised. “But if it’s been-“ he stutters, “a year, then you are eighteen now.”

Keith turns his head to the side so his voice isn’t quite so muffled. “’I’m homeless, not a runaway aren’t I? You smell wrong.”

Shiro ignores the last comment, not the weirdest he’s ever gotten from Keith, in favor of frowning down at him. “What about Adam? Surely he-”

“I haven’t seen Adam since he moved out.” Keith says, somewhat sharply, pulling back a bit to glare up at Shiro. “He wasn’t even at your funeral.”

“Oh.”

Shiro isn’t quite sure how to take that. On the one hand, Adam leaving him had hurt both him and Keith deeply. They had been dating for years and engaged for nearly ten months when Adam ended it, and that was a long time for someone to be part of your life and then cut themselves out of it so abruptly. Shiro had brooded for days (and cried) and Keith had been furious and wounded and once he’d been in a place to notice such things, Shiro had seen how it had set him at least three steps back in his “trusting people” progress. (He’d promptly torn down the chart for said progress. Adam had made it.) If Keith had actually run into Adam at Shiro’s _funeral_ ...that would _not_ have ended well.

(Shiro has never met anyone who can hold a grudge quite like Keith. Except maybe that McClain kid who decided to hold a grudge _against_ Keith.)

On the other hand...Knowing that Adam _wasn’t there_ . Not for the funeral, not for Keith when he _knows_ that Keith had no one without Shiro...that hurts just as much as when Shiro found the ring in the mail.

(And it seems wrong. Adam can be petty, but this...something isn’t right.)

Shiro pushes it out of his mind for now. He has more immediate problems to deal with.

Like the fact that Keith is homeless. And sleeping in an alleyway behind a restaurant.

It feels a bit like kicking a guy when he’s down, given how much time Shiro spent trying to make sure that Keith _wouldn’t_ end up like this. (A custody battle that stretched for _months_ . Because Shiro’d known that if Keith had been put back in the system after Baba Rei died that he’d disappear. Like he’d apparently done when _Shiro_ had died. And he deserves so much _more._ )

He draws back a little bit to get a good look at Keith.

His first impression had been pretty spot on. The last of the baby-fat roundness that had somehow managed to cling to Keith’s face through everything is gone, replaced by a thinness bordering on gaunt. He is pale and dirty with bags under his eyes the size of a small city. His clothes are also dirty and worn, and Shiro is pretty sure that at least two of the layers were originally _his_ , since they hang off of Keith in a way that is almost ridiculous.

“What have you been eating?” He blurts almost without meaning to, concerned by how much weight Keith has lost in the past year, especially given how little he had to lose in the first place.

Keith shrugs, looking uncomfortable, and almost like he’d rather they go back to talking about Adam. (And even getting him to acknowledge Adam’s existence had been a struggle in the weeks between the break-up and Shiro’s disappearance.) “Stuff.”

“Stuff.” Shiro is very proud of his deadpan. He learned from the best. _Thank you Obaasan._ “What kind of ‘stuff’ would this be?”

Keith looks away, staring intently at the ground in-between them, his arms crossed across his chest in a way that he’d nearly dropped completely the last time Shiro had seen him. _How much has this year hurt him? It’s almost as bad as when he first came to live with us._

“You know. Stuff. It’s why I hang out here a lot. Restaurants have good dumpsters, and not many people here lock theirs up.”

Shiro’s horror must show on his face because Keith hurries on. “And some of them trade me meals for odd jobs. I help the Garretts open most mornings and wash dishes for them a lot. And the Anuwats have me unload stuff for them all the time since their grandson left for college.”

His arms are crossed even tighter and more defensively now, and Shiro knows when to back-off. (He had learned through hard experience and much yelling on both their parts.)

“So,” Shiro says, suddenly struck with the utter ridiculousness of their situation. “I’m dead and you’re homeless. What do we do now?”

Keith’s jaw sets and Shiro knows even before he says anything that this is going to be a disaster.

“We find the people who-who _hurt_ you and make them _pay._ ”

“Keith, no!”

**Author's Note:**

> There will be more in this AU. Believe it or not, most of my ideas for it are borderline crack.


End file.
